Such bots are capable of performing human-like functions such as evaluating, deciding, learning and acting, allowing organisations to free staff from repetitive tasks, improving the efficiency and reducing the chances of human error.

RPA in the contact centre

Robotic process automation can be applied in many ways to improve customer experience and automate routine tasks.

In the field of customer experience their main role is to power chatbots: delivering automated responses to the most common, and predictable, customer enquiries that can be resolved with stock answers – but their potential is much greater.

As Santos Jha, business head for North America operations of Conneqt Business Solution, observes in this blog post, processing information is a mammoth task for organisations because of stringent compliance requirements: companies are required to collect the customer’s data, validate it, extract data from the documents, compile the data, and update the data in the future.

“The entire process is time-consuming which requires immense efforts on the part of human resource and patience on the part of the consumer to wait until all the information is processed,” he says.

He suggests a lot of backend tasks that rely on repetitive human efforts can be handled by RPA, freeing up human resources. “Tasks such as email processing and distribution, server backups and monitoring, time and attendance management, inventory management, etc can be automated to spare the human resources for customer-centric tasks.”

Boost efficiency, accuracy, and productivity

A telco used RPA to automate the process of ‘onboarding’ mobile customers, and greatly reduced both activation time and activation errors

The Institute for Robotic Process Automation has produced a guide detailing the many ways RPA can assist in the delivery of the customer experience.

It includes the example of “a major financial services group in Italy.” The organisation deployed RPA along with desktop automation to handle routine, critical jobs that require accurate, fast handling.

“Robots then complete the time-consuming wrap-up phase, including documenting cases and outcomes, freeing agents to focus on more value-added tasks and to begin the next interaction immediately after concluding a previous one.”

The Institute says the financial services group was able to drive quality, predictability and speed. “The company now handles more than 8,000 alerts per month with greater than 99 percent accuracy in preventing fraudulent activity.”